FLAUBERT, I believe, designed once to publish a Dictionary of Errors, and would actually have set about it had he not found the subject growing much too vast for any human pen. He also designed a reference book, or rather anthology, of follies, stupidities, rash judgments, and absurdities, but never lived to complete this great task. Now, reading this, I have wondered whether two little books might not be written which should prove useful severally to the undergraduate and to the politician. I do not say to the schoolboy, for no book yet written ever was or ever will be useful to him. But for the undergraduate a useful book might be written which I shall presently describe, and which would make a sort of foundation for all his studies. So also for the politician a second book might be written which should be of the greatest service. Let me now describe these two books. Perhaps among those who read this there will be so many men of leisure and learning as can in combination give the world the volumes I imagine. The first book should be called “Modern Thought,” and in this, without praise or blame and without any wandering into metaphysics or religion, the young fellow should be plainly taught to distinguish the[231] certain from the uncertain. I know of nothing in which academic training just now is more at fault. That training seems to consist in two branches. First, the setting down of a very great number of things each equally certain with the last and all forming together one huge amorphic body or lump of assertion; second, a whole sheaf of theories, the whole fun of which consists in the fact that no one of them can positively be proved but that all are guesswork. These theories change from year to year, and while they are defended with a passion astonishing to those who live in a larger world, there is no pretence that they are true. The whole business of them is quite obviously a game. Consider, for instance, history. A lad is taught that William the Conqueror won at Hastings in 1066; that the opinion of the English people was behind the little wealthy clique that put an end to the Stuarts; that London heartily sympathised with the seven Bishops; that all Parliamentary institutions grew up on the soil of this island in the thirteenth century from Saxon origins; and that four people called Hengist, and Horsa, and Aella, and Cerdic led a great number of Germans to various points of this Island, killed the people living there and put the Germans in their stead. Now of these assertions, all of which he is to receive with equal certitude, all dogmatically affirmed, all taught to him as brute bits of truth—some, as that about Hastings, are rigidly true; some, such as the attitude of London towards the seven Bishops,[232] are morally certain (though hardly capable of definite proof); some, as the weight of public opinion behind the Whigs, debatable though probable; some, like the Hengist and Horsa business, almost certainly mere legends—and so forth. It is to be noted that, if you are to teach at all, you must always have in your teaching some admixture of this error. No one can exactly balance the degree of probability attaching to each separate statement; there is no time to array all the evidence, and if there were, the mind of the student could not carry it. Each teacher, moreover, will have a scheme of values somewhat different from his neighbour’s; but even if some admixture of the error I speak of be necessary, at least let the student be warned that it exists. For if he is not so warned one of two things will happen: either he will believe all he is told, with the most appalling results to himself, and, should he later become powerful, to the whole nation (we are seeing something of that in economics to-day), or he will (as the cleverer undergraduate usually does) become sceptical of all he hears; he will begin to wonder, having once found his teacher out in, let us say, the absurdity of pretending that Parliamentary institutions were peculiar to Britain, whether the Battle of Hastings were really fought in 1066 or no. When he has discovered, as any boy of education, travel, and common sense will discover, that the Normans were not Scandinavians, but Frenchmen, he will be led to reason that perhaps William the Conqueror[233] never existed at all. This mood of universal scepticism is even more dangerous than that of bovine assurance, more dangerous to character, that is, and more dissolving of national strength.
As with the assertions so with the theories. There was a theory, for instance, that a tenure of land existed in ancient England by which this land was the common property of all, and was called the land of the “folk.” Then this theory burst, and another theory swelled, which was that the “folk land” meant the land held by customary right as distinguished from land held by charter. Again, there was a theory that an original Saxon tendency to breed large landowners had gradually prevailed over feudal tenure. This theory burst, and another theory swelled, which was that the large units of land grew up by an accidental interpretation of Roman law.
In the book I propose all these theories could be very simply dealt with. The student should be warned that they are theories, and theories only, that their whole point and value is that they are not susceptible to positive proof; that what makes them amusing and interesting is the c............